Erik Dasque

Erik Dasque

CTO · Team Builder · Lifelong Engineer's Engineer

About

I've spent the last twenty-five years building and rebuilding engineering organizations at startups and mature companies, often where change was needed as the engineering team needed to grow or grow up — in size, process, best-practice adoption, or capacity.

I'm still, at heart, an engineer. I write code, and I'd rather sit with a team debugging a hard problem than sit in a room talking about one. That's on purpose: the people I've managed longest say the same thing back to me — that I stay technical enough to be useful, then get out of the way and trust people to own their work. I care as much about developing that ownership muscle in engineers as I do about the systems themselves. I've scaled organizations past 150 people, and I'm just as much at ease in a small, agile startup as in a larger company — scale is in my DNA.

What I'm actually good at is the turnaround: walking into an under-resourced, chaotic, or underperforming engineering org and building the structure, culture, and technical foundation it needs to scale, without losing the people who got it there. I've done that from three-person teams to organizations of over a hundred, through acquisitions, funding rounds, and a few genuine emergencies.

Outside of work: DIY electronics, technical scuba diving, car racing, and photography. I'm also fluent in French, which occasionally comes in handy.

Experience

  1. CTO · Allure Security

    2022 – present

    Rebuilt the engineering team and modernized the product from the ground up while stabilizing and eventually replacing the legacy system. Integrated multi-modal GenAI with classical detection methods. Led AI adoption across engineering and the company more broadly — starting AI-first with code review, documentation, debugging, and unit test writing, then quickly extending into code writing itself — reaching 100% adoption within engineering and driving real gains in code quality and productivity, with a meaningful positive impact on product delivery and customers. Joined pre-Series A with under $1M ARR; helped secure Series A and B funding and grew revenue past $12M ARR across 300+ clients.

    • J2EE
    • Spring Boot
    • SQS
    • Kafka
    • EKS/Kubernetes
    • Lambda
    • PostgreSQL
    • Bedrock
    • LangChain
    • Python
    • Claude Code

  2. VP of Engineering · FormAssembly

    2020 – 2022

    Grew the engineering team to 30 as ARR grew over 50%. Shipped a Salesforce workflow builder, a Sales Engineer demo sandbox, and several new payment connectors. FormAssembly had its best year ever in 2021 at $16M ARR.

    • Laravel
    • ReactJS
    • AWS
    • MySQL
    • GoLang
    • Salesforce

  3. EVP of Engineering · Validity

    2018 – 2020

    Grew the product and engineering org past 100 engineers through four new product initiatives and five acquisitions (over $500M combined), leading technical due diligence and integration on each. Revenue grew from $12M to over $150M ARR in two years.

    • Java/Spring Boot
    • ReactJS
    • Docker
    • Ruby on Rails
    • DynamoDB
    • GoLang
    • Kubernetes

  4. VP of Engineering · Evertrue

    2016 – 2018

    Took over and grew a 20-person engineering team, shipped a new Volunteer Management System, and grew ARR from $3M to $7M. Presented at quarterly board meetings through a Series C round; Evertrue was later acquired.

    • Java/Dropwizard
    • ReactJS
    • Cassandra
    • Spark/Storm/Kafka
    • AWS

  5. Senior Director of Engineering · Constant Contact

    2012 – 2016

    Grew a team from 15 to 55+ engineers building Constant Contact's next-generation email marketing and small-business products, reaching over $300M ARR. Started the Engineers4Engineers conference and the internal Docker bootcamp. Constant Contact was acquired by Endurance for $1.1B.

    • Java/J2EE
    • Ruby on Rails
    • Cassandra
    • Node.js
    • Docker
    • OpenStack

  6. VP of Product Development · Vivaki Nerve Center (Publicis)

    2009 – 2012

    Grew and turned around three SEM/marketing-intelligence products across Boston, Paris, and Chicago teams.

    • PHP
    • MySQL
    • MongoDB
    • AWS

  7. VP of Engineering · BzzAgent

    2005 – 2009

    Grew engineering from 3 to 20+ building a high-traffic word-of-mouth marketing platform, including an international presence and a mobile app. Acquired by Dunnhumby.

    • J2EE
    • Ruby on Rails
    • PostgreSQL

  8. Senior Product Manager (Mono Project, J2EE App Server) · SilverStream / Novell

    1997 – 2005

    Product management across the Mono Project and the J2EE application server/ePortal line; started in pre-sales in Paris.

    • J2EE
    • .NET/Mono

Skills

Leadership & Process

  • Org building & scaling (3 → 100+ engineers)
  • Technical due diligence & M&A integration
  • Agile/Scrum
  • Mentorship & career growth

Languages & Frameworks

  • Java/J2EE, Spring Boot
  • GoLang
  • Python
  • Node.js
  • Ruby on Rails
  • PHP/Laravel
  • ReactJS

Data & Cloud

  • AWS (EKS, Lambda, SQS)
  • Kubernetes & Docker
  • PostgreSQL, MySQL, DynamoDB, Cassandra
  • Kafka, Spark

AI & Security

  • GenAI/LLM integration (LangChain, Claude Code)
  • Claude, Codex, Amazon Nova & Bedrock
  • Local LLMs
  • AppSec/InfoSec, SOC2, ISO 27001, GDPR/CCPA

Contact

Best reached by email or LinkedIn.

Download Résumé (PDF)